Living the Dream

He made me do it, she made me feel it, the devil made me do it, the drugs …alcohol …PTSS….SAD….made me do it….”  The list goes on to adnauseum.  The reality is… no one is responsible for your emotions but you.  No one can make you feel anything you do not want to feel.  Whatever you are feeling, is a state of mind, if it is not evolving from within in the first place.  You can not, I think, control your emotions but you CAN control the mind that decides how we act out our emotions.  We can use our minds to reflect on emotions.  While we may not be directly responsible for any particular emotion, we are certainly indirectly responsible, at least, for them, however helpless we may feel before them. Even the mind can be wrong about our feelings and misread the feelings of others.

Whatever you feel, you have your own right to feel, but to place those feelings on others, if they are negative, is unjust.  Also, we cannot control other people’s thoughts or emotions.  I can not ever say, “I know what you are feeling…that is not authentic.  I might understand some…but I am not you.  I do not know how deeply you process an emotion about a person, place, thing or incident.  I may have had a similar incident…maybe even the same incident, but how it affects us, what it means to us, is never the same.  We are all unique, even in our feelings and emotions.

I believe our emotions and feelings may be separate.  “Many emotions are distinctively human and they are far more complicated than mere “feelings.”-writes Dr. Robert C. Solomon.  (The University of Texas at Austin, Ph.D., University of Michigan)  Our emotions are body-responses… innate gifts.  I believe our feelings are psychological responses that come from the energy of emotions.  We can block, deny, stuff our feelings but we cannot stop emotional responses.  Emotions are energy and energy can not be extinguished, energy, if not released, is stored.

We have fear-based emotions and love-based emotions.  Fear-based include; anger, depression, anxiety, loneliness, guilt, shame, etc.  Love-based emotions are joy, happiness, trust, satisfaction, peace, etc.    We spend our lives here dealing with these issues in one form or another.  We feel them or do not feel them, but we are still full of energy either expressed or repressed.  Feelings are indicators of our inner emotions.  It is so easy to generalize.  We have to be careful to not let our minds define our emotions or feelings.  We can anesthetize feelings (think alcohol, drugs obsessions).  We can not numb or stuff our emotional energy.  It is there and if we have put a stopped on them, they will find a way out, and not typically a nice blow-out.  I told my daughter, who is dealing with a drug problem, that if she put the kind of energy she had used to use on positivity, there is nothing she can not do.  She, now, in her healing has told me that was one of her motivations as she entered treatment and is working towards a healthy lifestyle.  We cry…..crying is an innate release of emotion.  But, we have also used crying to express feelings, and this kind of crying is a method of control…mind control…it helps us stay sad if we want to be sad, we use it to control others.

Steven Hein wrote “The Ten Habits of Emotionally Intelligent People” (1999) that explains Emotionally Intelligent people as those who: label their feelings rather than labeling situations or people, distinguish between thoughts and feelings, tale responsibility for their feelings, use their feelings to make decisions, show respect for other’s feelings, feel energized not angry, validate other people’s feelings, and practice getting positive lessons from their negative emotions.

When I am agonizing, emotionally, I am aware, now, of the energy that I expend.  Perhaps why I was always so frantic and frenetic was to deal with all this stored-up energy.  It came from deep levels.  I have had to accept that levels of suffering are just part of life.  How I react to them, authentically, is how I can feel healing.  If I block…I do not feel anything, let alone the joy of having gotten through it.  I had to learn to allow it, rather than avoid, numb, and flitter through it.  Perhaps some of this deeper level creativity and inspiration, soulful energy, is coming from learning how to release it with dignity and grace.  Will I have an emotional meltdown again?  But, of course I will.  It will come up on me and begin, but I have a sense that I will grab that light of misbegotten energy and hold it in my spiritual palms until it is gentled.  I will not get so lost in it.  I experience some of this when my daughter was here and some energy started calibrating ways to burst…I was able, after a few minutes, to get it to where I could manage it.  So I will continue to try to figure this out:  Emotions versus Feelings.  Feelings, perhaps, are figments of our mind and emotions are a message from the soul?

Now I know this, who am I gunna blame?  *grin*

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